Canadians debating net neutrality in wake of Bell throttling

After Bell Canada started throttling P2P traffic during evening hours, even …

Arguments about network neutrality haven't made much headway in Canada (perhaps it's hard to get traction on all that ice?), despite several years of traffic shaping from cable operators like Rogers. But now that Bell Canada has jumped aboard the P2P throttling dogsled and is mushing ahead with all possible speed, the issue has suddenly become high-profile news, spawning numerous articles in the mainstream press and launching several strenuous protest movements. It has also led Bell to dig in, arguing that it not only has the right to throttle its own customers and its wholesale buyers, but that the government should butt out of the wholesale line-sharing business altogether.

Bell Canada has been shaping P2P traffic for its own DSL customers for some time, but a real furor erupted late last month when it was revealed that Bell was also using deep packet inspection gear to throttle the access it sold to its wholesale customers. P2P traffic was bandwidth-limited during the evening hours, despite the fact that legitimate groups like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation have begun distributing video content using BitTorrent. This, of course, removed one of the keys ways that DSL resellers could differentiate themselves (no throttling here!) from Bell and it affected even those resellers who were explicitly anti-throttling.

The protests

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is Canada's version of the FCC, and its acronym is just as vowel-free as its US counterpart. It has been the target of a complaint against Bell's tactics brought last week by the National Union of Public and General Employees. The labor labour union complained to CRTC's wonderfully-named boss, Konrad W. von Finckenstein, and demanded a full investigation.

"These Internet Service Providers are, with little or no public accountability, implementing measures that will discriminate against the use of legal software for legitimate uses," said the NUPGE letter. "This is unacceptable. The potential for violations of the privacy rights of users is clear. The continued silence on these matters by the CRTC and the Canadian government violates the trust the Canadian people have placed in you."

In addition, the Campaign for Democratic Media today launched a pressure campaign of its own called "Stop the Throttler." The campaign targets both Bell and Rogers for traffic shaping, pointing out the many legal uses of a technology that is now being adopted by even the biggest of media companies, such as NBC Universal in the US.

"Big Telecom Corporations should not dictate what Canadians access on the Internet," said Campaign for Democratic Media national coordinator Steve Anderson. "These Internet service providers are discriminating against Internet content and services, without any public accountability. The government needs to take action to guarantee equal access to the Internet for all."

Death to regulated wholesale pricing!

But the throttlers continue to throttle, and Bell has even asked the CRTC to get out of the business of requiring it to lease wholesale access to other ISPs at all. (The US removed this requirement years ago after the Brand X decision that classified DSL as an "information service.") At the moment, Bell is forced to lease its lines to competitors, just as it has done for the last decade. But Bell now says that the whole goal of the program was to incubate infrastructure development and that it has failed miserably at doing so.

We'll see

As the CBC makes clear in an article this week, Bell wants CRTC to remove the 10-year old regulations on its wholesale business (though it says it would still sell wholesale access at market rates, which would no doubt be higher and less competitive, which is what happened in the US). The line-sharing rules have not encouraged smaller ISPs to build out networks of their own, Bell says, and instead have left most of them wholly dependent on Bell for their businesses.

Bell's regulatory affairs boss, Mirko Bibic, said that the leasing ISPs "haven't built much. The problem is, there's no weaning off. There's an underlying and ongoing and indefinite reliance on access to incumbent networks."

Government stays away

The Canadian government has in the past pushed the CRTC to deregulate the telecom industry, an approach still backed by Minister of Industry Jim Prentice. Prentice also wants to stay out of the current net neutrality debate, which would seem to be a de facto vote against the idea.

He was asked in the House of Commons this week whether his government would do anything about the current Bell/Rogers traffic-shaping controversy. According to the Globe & Mail, Prentice said only that "we will continue to leave the matter between consumers on the one hand and Internet service providers on the other."

With the government unwilling to intervene, it's up to groups like NUPGE, the Campaign for Democratic Media, and law professor Michael Geist to bang the neutrality drum. Geist, in particular, has been doing his part, pushing the issue in his widely-carried weekly column on technology and law. But with the government unwilling to do anything and the major infrastructure owners in Canada apparently on board with a discriminatory traffic-shaping agenda, there may be little such groups can do.

The options appear to be two: 1) rousing the CRTC to action, just as the FCC has here gotten involved in the Comcast throttling case, or 2) raising a chorus of consumer voices so loud that Bell and Rogers will have to listen.

Otherwise, with filtering well-established as a Canadian precedent, ISPs will be able to continue picking the winners (legal video over cable, good!) and the losers (legal video over BitTorrent, bad!) on the Internet.